Across writing, painting, and her “trend forecasting” collective K-HOLE, Dena Yago is an armchair theorist of those aesthetic sensibilities so banal and pernicious—so normal and boring—that they could easily go unnoticed. Thrillingly, this makes them all the more fascinating. Yago has turned her attention to such phenomena as the Amazon bags that have become urban tumbleweeds, and to the subtly evolving meanings of ordinary words like “capacity.” Often, when one puts language to a phenomenon, you start to see it everywhere.
With an artist’s keen eye to the world around her, she has opined on the aesthetics of irony and of cringe, and with her other K-HOLE cofounders, she coined the now ubiquitous term “normcore.” In her paintings, she updates the language of Pop Art to probe the visual culture of late capitalism. A new collection of her writings, That Figures: Selected Writings, is out this month from After 8 Books. For the occasion, Art in America asked her to single out 5 books on her shelf.
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The Golden Notebook
By Doris Lessing
I read The Golden Notebook when I turned 30. A friend gave it to me as a birthday gift, and it took me a while to read, but it’s really special. To me, it’s about how you don’t need to reconcile the political, the economic, the domestic, the maternal, and so on. These things can coexist and weave together. The book made me think about the pressure to reconcile oneself as a political citizen and an artist, versus allowing oneself to be a citizen and also an artist. The protagonist is politically active, and a mother and a writer and all these other things, and all these roles have different expectations.
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Seasonal Associate
By Heike Geissler
I’ve always had this book on the reading list when I’ve taught. Geissler worked as a seasonal associate at Amazon, but the book’s conceit is framing it in the second person: You are doing this, you are doing that. It’s one of the best things I’ve read that brings you into the position of being within a logistical infrastructure where you don’t really have agency, and shows what that experience does to your psyche and bodily self.
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The Odd One In: On Comedy
By Alenka Zupančič
I read this book right after college, when I went with an artist to the European Graduate School and helped take care of her kid in exchange for taking some of the classes. The author was a student of Slavoj Žižek and is a Nietzsche scholar who has written a lot about comedy.
The Odd One In is about short-circuiting in comedy, and how different forms of comedy reveal the instability of different structures. With writing, I have a very specific breed of comedy in my own work—an unstable version of it. Comedy reveals the failure of systems and their absurdity, but more specifically their fissures and instabilities. I play with that a lot with language in the visual work I make—for instance the diptych Down for Now and Not for Long. It used phrases from common parlance, but pushed you to read all their valences: a phrase can be optimistic or cynical, containing both.
Zupančič also writes about slipping on a banana peel, and when I think about the work I did with K-HOLE, a lot of it was about pushing things to their points of failure. You can do that through institutional critique or through comedy.
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Tender Buttons
By Gertrude Stein
I was thinking about the books I have in my studio and reach for often, and Tender Buttons is one. It deals with language as material, letting words expand and contract their meaning. Whenever I get stuck—mostly on poetry or phrasing for visual works—I return to it. In my visual work, I try to pay attention to phrasing or words that take on a cultural significance and bubble up into a different meaning than they had previously. The show I did at JTT in 2023 was called “Capacity” for that reason. It was a word suddenly being used in multiple ways: whether one has the capacity for care, or in the professional sense, as a way of trying to be polite. It evokes a kind of exhaustion. I’m interested in things with multiple meanings
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Pattern Recognition
By William Gibson
I made a series with Pattern Recognition and Gibson’s other book Zero History. I’m revisiting his Spook Country right now for another piece: an essay about logistics, shipping-container aesthetics, and what it all means now.
The protagonist of Pattern Recognition is a woman named Cayce Pollard, a trend forecaster and brand consultant. I didn’t know that job existed before reading the book in college. It laid out a role I thought I could inhabit. She has a physical reaction to brands: they pay her as a consultant; she walks in, and if the brand is not to her sensibility, she breaks out in hives. Aside from being incredibly cool, she speaks to the embodied aspects of taste.